Marchi’s Better Than Guarantano, Part II

Sometimes the truth hurts

Last season East Tennessee State traveled to Knoxville to play the Tennessee Volunteers for the first time in football.

It was something of a courtesy for the Buccaneers program, who had been resurrected after 12 years. This would be ETSU’s first game against an FBS opponent since the revival and the first time they’d ever take on the Vols on the gridiron, so the role the Bucs would play was obvious.

• Take the nice $500,000 check from Master.
• Take a beating.
• Continue the role as a subservient entity to the University of Tennessee.

Outside of college football, that’s called being a prostitute.

So to find an identity for my on-and-off hometown of the last 33 years, Johnson City, to be known for something other than “a day’s drive to 77 percent of the rest of the country,” I wanted to find something, ANYTHING that ETSU had over the Vols.

And I came up with it. The quarterback.

See, last year the Vols and Bucs began the season with the wrong quarterbacks. That’s become rather obvious in hindsight since Jarrett Guarantano has underwhelmed, but in 2018 he was the incumbent starter, turned to in desperation in 2017 by embattled head coach Butch Jones, who had coached Guarantano’s father at Rutgers a generation before.

If Jones was going to go down, he wasn’t going to leave the legacy recruit as a…